Income models for Open Access: Appendix A: Publishing Services for OA Journals

As online publishing and hosting services can represent a significant portion of the costs of publishing an open-access journal, they merit particular attention here. Providers of free online publishing and hosting services explicitly intended for open-access journals include:

eScholarship, California Digital Library

Scholarly Exchange

The Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan

Each of the services above has its own business model: eScholarship is funded by the California Digital Library (and limits support to journals sponsored from within the University of California system), Scholarly Exchange uses advertising, and the Scholarly Publishing Office relies on an institutional subsidy and cross-subsidies from income-generating activities. While these platforms vary in the range of services they provide, they all provide a channel for open-access distribution without a direct cost to the journal.

Although it does not advertise itself primarily as a provider of open-access publishing services, PubMed Central provides a publishing venue for open-access journals in biomedicine. A publisher might also elect to use an open-source publishing software solution—such as Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/), epress (http://www.epress.ac.uk/), DPubS (http://dpubs.org/), and others—which requires some customization and maintenance on the publisher’s part.